The first solo exhibition by Lorenzo Puglisi in New York, with its opening on 17 January 2025, was held at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura on Park Avenue. Lorenzo Puglisi. Painting in New York, curated by the art critic Guicciardo Sassoli de' Bianchi Strozzi and inaugurated by the Institute's director, Fabio Finotti, comprises a selection of works created specifically for the event during the artist's stay in the city, where he set up his studio in the Italian Cultural Institute's new Padiglione Peccioli.
Puglisi's pictorial research is characterised by the pervasive use of black to create a background of absolute darkness: from it burst streams of light capable of defining volumes, faces and parts of the body, like presences caught in an expression or a gesture, in a movement towards the essence of representation, dense with references to the history of painting.
On view until 15 February 2025, the exhibition highlights the artist's iconographic vision and unmistakable style. Puglisi's powerful, evocative figures emerge from dark backgrounds, an aesthetic that has made him well known in recent years. His mysterious subjects, accompanied by vigorous brushstrokes in tones of white and red, make their debut in the United States in this exhibition conceived and produced in New York.
Lorenzo Puglisi (Biella, 1971) lives and works in Bologna. In recent years his artistic research has focused on large canvases referring to works of the past and filtered through his own iconography, beginning with the exhibition Paintings curated by Mark Gisbourne in Paris in 2016. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, at the CAC La Traverse in Paris (2015), the Museo Riso in Palermo (2016), the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples (2017), The Historical Museum in Bremen (2017), Villa Bardini in Florence (2017), the Museo Casa Boschi Di Stefano in Milan (2018), the Kühlhaus in Berlin (2019), the Crypt of King's Cross St. Pancras Church in London (2019), the Sagrestia del Bramante in Milan (2019), Norman Foster's Moore House in London (2020), the Museo Marino Marini in Florence (2021).
In 2019, on the occasion of his solo exhibition Il Grande Sacrificio in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he exhibited a six-metre-long oil on panel depicting his vision of the Cenacolo Vinciano, to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci; a monograph on his work was published by the German publisher Hatje Cantz (Berlin).
During Frieze London 2019 he exhibited in the Crypt of King's Cross St. Pancras Church in London, and in the same year the director of the Uffizi, Dr Eike Schmidt, commissioned a self-portrait from him for the collections of the Gallerie degli Uffizi.
In 2020 he opened an exhibition in the Basilica di Santo Spirito in Florence with one of his paintings, Crocifissione, placed before Michelangelo's wooden crucifix.
In 2021 he held an exhibition of his work at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (Art Museum Riga Bourse) in collaboration with the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, which lent Ritratto di uomo, a masterpiece by Jacopo Robusti, il Tintoretto.
In 2022 he was invited to exhibit his paintings at the 59th Venice Biennale in the Arab-Syrian pavilion on the island of San Servolo, staging an exhibition entitled Viaggio al termine della notte, which aroused great interest among the media, critics and the public. In the same year his self-portrait entered the collection of the Gallerie degli Uffizi: the work is now part of the group of 255 works (from 1400 to the present day) on display in the new installation opened in 2023 across twelve rooms of the Florentine museum, with artists such as Primaticcio, Beccafumi, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Delacroix, Wildt, Hayez, Sironi, Ensor, Vedova, Carrà, through to the contemporary Pistoletto, Gormley, Clemente, Paladino, Bill Viola and Ai Weiwei.
A monograph on his work published by Skira and written by Marco Meneguzzo appeared in 2023 as a summation of twenty years of his career. In October of the same year he staged a major exhibition in London at the Brun Fine Art gallery, with which he works and collaborates.
In 2024 he created a theatre curtain for an important Florentine collection, following artists such as Aldo Mondino, Carla Accardi, Getulio Alviani, Mimmo Paladino, Luigi Mainolfi, Pino Pinelli, Fabrizio Plessi; in the same year he opened an exhibition with Aldo Mondino in Florence and Bologna organised by the Archivio Mondino and the gallerist Santo Ficara.